Indigenous Aesthetics
I learned not long ago that Culture and Art Publishing House of Beijing is translating my first book, Indigenous Aesthetics, and publishing it in China. This comes as a pleasant surprise because the book was brought out by the University of Texas Press more than twenty years ago. When you produce something, you really can’t predict the life that it may have after it enters the wider world! The translation is scheduled to be completed at the end of 2022, with the book being scheduled for release in China in mid-2023.
The book confronts some of the traditional philosophical concerns of aesthetics such as the definition of art from an indigenous perspective. It also incorporates topics such as art and religion, a sense of place, and the function of beauty in Native cultures that had been neglected in much twentieth-century art theory. In addition, I tied the activity of indigenous documentary filmmaking, which I analyze in depth, to earlier antecedents such as novels by Native authors and the powwow as a dance and ceremonial form.
I think this willingness to focus on aesthetic issues beyond those found in the Western literature on the topic must have attracted the Chinese editors who are now working on the translation. Aesthetic theories are found in China, Japan, Africa, India and elsewhere. As with the Native American context, the ideas might best be discovered in the domain of applied criticism, documentaries, instructional processes and theories and so forth. To borrow Harold Garfinkel’s term, there is an ethnomethodology available for aesthetics. Discovering these multiple meanings of the role of the aesthetic dimension of our lives enriches all of us.
How did this book come about? Well, I had long been interested in the role that the arts play in cross-cultural communication. Can they help alleviate the misunderstandings between people from different cultures that sometimes escalate into conflicts? This potential of art receives heightened awareness when conflict is brewing or has recently occurred. For instance, there was a “Zenboom” in the West during the 1950s, just after the Second World War had been concluded. In a context of conflict, people look to art for resolution and understanding.
My own experience of Native cultures prior to writing the book was not extensive. I had read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and other literature of social conscience in the 1970s. Later, while studying at the Annenberg School for Communication in Philadelphia, I became familiar with a strand of research in visual anthropology that had sought to investigate “Native ways of seeing” in filmmaking. This research involved an experiment by Sol Worth and John Adair in the 1960s, in which the researchers had provided film cameras to members of the Navajo community and encouraged them to make films but with little instruction. They wanted to see if there was a different film language, an indigenous aesthetic of film, that would emerge.
During the 1970s and 1980s, with funding becoming available through various public entities, more Native filmmakers began creating documentaries about their historical and contemporary cultures. Many of these films examined expression, whether song, dance, storytelling or the visual arts. I realized that by analyzing a number of documentaries I could discover thematic and formal elements that would point to a distinct indigenous aesthetic in Native cultures. How do Native people themselves document and tell the histories and meanings of their expressive forms? The book blends study from several disciplines including media studies, aesthetic anthropology, cultural studies, and the philosophy of art.
Aesthetics is the philosophy of art, but it had traditionally been bound by the concerns of the Western academic tradition. By analyzing films and videos created by and about Native peoples, it was possible to expand the topics within aesthetics beyond the bounds of Western academic culture. I found that there were specific community-based meanings for aesthetic expression in Native cultures that had been overlooked in Western aesthetic theory of the last two hundred years. To acknowledge this is to be more inclusive and diverse in thinking about art and its role in our lives. Indigenous aesthetics points to the role that art serves in the formation of collective identity for Native peoples.
Aspects of indigenous aesthetics have reflexive value for non-Native peoples. Many modern individuals may have a sense that art has become separated from society, having grown into a specialized domain that is primarily of interest to a powerful group “artworld” specialists. Indigenous aesthetics points toward the possibility of a place- and community-based art that is integrated into the fabric of peoples’ daily lives.
